Goucher College aims to level playing field with video application option

Higher education is in a period of rapid change, and no one is perpetuating the movement more than Goucher College. The school is now accepting video applications in place of the Common Application.

As of Sept. 5, students are able to submit a two-minute vignette of themselves answering the question, “How do you see yourself at Goucher?” They must also send two samples of work from high school, one being a graded writing assignment at least one page in length and another ranging anywhere from a lab report to a piece of artwork.

The driving force behind this radical simplification is the significant growth of “undermatching,” says President Jose Antonio Bowen, PhD. Undermatching is the idea that there is a wealth of academically gifted students at low-income schools that do not have the resources or knowledge of how to apply, enroll or graduate from competitive colleges. Traditional applications can provide a leg up for the privileged, as testing tends to favor those students who can afford the expensive coaching, which can lead to the higher scores.

Bowen hopes that the ubiquity of cellphones will encourage students to apply via video.

“We want to make it possible for kids who don’t think they can attend to actually attend,” Bowen says. “With cellphones having a deeper penetration than laptops theses days, we know that filming on a phone is much simpler than typing an entire essay or filling out a lengthy application on it.”

“With cellphones having a deeper penetration than laptops theses days, we know that filming on a phone is much simpler than typing an entire essay or filling out a lengthy application on it.”

None of the schools that Danielle Winkler, a senior at Villa Maria Academy in Erie, Pa., is applying to offer any sort of supplement, but she thinks a video would help making applying to college seem like less of a headache.

“It’s like a one-stop-shop for college. The Common App takes so much time to complete,” she says. “I wish I could utilize the video application because it seems so much more convenient and an accurate depiction of who I am.”

Selective schools such as Tufts University, George Mason University and St. Mary’s College of Maryland have all allowed videos applications to accompany written applications at some point, but Goucher is currently the only school to allow the video to replace the Common Application. Goucher is using the video application as a primary determinant of a student’s acceptance.

Goucher’s approach aims to make applying to college more transparent in order to include students from all different socioeconomic backgrounds. It eliminates the need for tutors and prep books and the costs of potential “resume building programs” such as educational summer camps or volunteer trips in foreign countries intended to make students more appealing to admissions officers.

Aside from the socioeconomic service, the video application also allows students to put their best face forward and showcase their personality in a way they never could with the old system, according to Allen Grove, college admissions expert for About.com and English professor at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y.

Grove hopes that the video application will create a human being rather than a jumble of empirical data and allow students to show promising characteristics that grades and test scores don’t.

Ashley Juliano, a senior at Central Bucks High School West in Doylestown, Pa., believes that a video would make up what her writing skills might be lacking. “I’m a people person and I love to talk about things, and in writing sometimes my personality can get lost,” she says. “So if you are seeing me face to face I think I have the chance to make a more memorable impression.”

The videos will be evaluated on a 1-5 scale, with 1 being absent and 5 being extraordinary. The criteria are content/thoughtfulness, structure/organization and clarity/effectiveness. Bowen asserts that video production skills will not be taken into account in the assessment. Each video application will be graded by an admissions counselor and a faculty member.

While Goucher currently stands alone as the only school to give students the option to completely disregard the Common App, nearly 100 schools have at least gone test-optional since 2004, strengthening the trend to de-emphasize the weight a standardized test can carry in an admissions decision, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.

“I think colleges are beginning to recognize that the current system has severe limitations,” says Bowen. “Before the admissions process used to be saying ‘no’ but we want to say ‘yes’ in more ways. College is more valuable now than it ever was, so not having a degree is a real handicap.”